🚂 Is your newsletter going anywhere?

Prologue

Are you using your newsletter to bring people along on a journey?

One of my favorite things about the newsletter genre is that it’s like a passenger train with a specific destination in mind—learn more about X; enjoy more Y; or become amazing at Z—and with each issue more passengers decide to board and travel with the conductor (creator).

Let’s extend this further.

Your open rate is the number of people who not only boarded the train, but who are actually paying attention to the announcements.

Your click rate represents the people who think your announcements are really interesting and worth exploring (maybe this train is making stops like a trolley tour and encouraging riders to visit relevant sites).

The 1:1 responses you get from people (we’re talking actual replies) represent the people who are A) getting the most out of the journey and want to personally let you know OR B) not sure why they’re on this ride and want you to know they could do it better (be careful how much weight you give these people).

And on and on, issue after issue, the growing crowd of people who’ve joined you for this ride experience an adventure of your creation—opening, clicking, responding, absorbing, and deciding with each send if the ride is worth the effort.

Are you connecting? Bringing people along? Building excitement?

Are you attracting an audience that finds it helpful and comforting—perhaps thrilling—to join you in this journey?

Today’s Opt In Challenge (last section of the newsletter for anyone new this week) involves learning how to whisper pitch, which essentially means to sell without being obnoxious. To me, that means emailing with the intention to be so valuable to your reader that when you tell them what you sell they have no doubt it will be good.

And for the editorial newsletter creators in the crowd, it could be that your whisper pitch is simply your next issue, aka the next leg of the journey.

Hoping you find today’s roundup of resources as exciting as I do.

Screen Share

Newsletters Should Come From Real People

Stop assuming anonymity works when you send your email newsletters.

We care what real people have to say. Not brands.

Mary Ellen Slayter (she/her) of Managing Editor Magazine says that if you are writing a newsletter with an emphasis on creating strong relationships with your readers, it’s best to use a person's name. This clip is an excerpt from a conversation we had last fall about her experience editing hundreds of newsletters.

The reason email newsletters achieve above average open rates (30% is considered high for most industries) is because they consistently deliver information worth their readers’ time.

When you send something that’s actually valuable, it’s easier to attach your name to it.

If no one on the team wants to be the “sender,” what does that say?

Mary Ellen hosted an amazing panel at Newsletter Fest last week: Blurred Lines--What Marketers and Journalists can Learn from Each Other When it Comes to Serving Readers and Growing Loyal Audiences.

Participants included

Trello’s Chris Kaundart, Rani Shah, and Write | Werk founder Leah Ryder
Ryan Johnston (Co-Founder + CEO at 6AM City)
Jenny Rothenberg (former Director of Growth at Morning Brew)
Sarah Ebner (new head of newsletters at the Financial Times in London, previously at The Telegraph)

Check out the replay of this panel here.

Newsletter Tips

2 Things We Learned Launching An Event-Specific Newsletter

Today’s Prologue was partly inspired by the engagement we saw with the Newsletter Fest newsletter. We definitely brought people along for the journey with that one.

We launched a landing page, promised we’d update subscribers as speakers and sessions were added, and published about once a week for six weeks leading up to the event.

The screenshot you’re seeing is from the week of the event. Our average open rate was 62% and average click rate was 18%. In other words, people welcomed this newsletter and clicked to sign up for sessions.

What we learned:

A newsletter isolated to an event can perform better than a traditional newsletter that mentions an event in each issue. It gives the most interested people a chance to receive the updates they want and when you deliver what you promise in your value proposition, they engage. They got exactly what they signed up for and the time factor (we were counting down to an event that would take up time on their calendars) meant there was more urgency to open than a traditional newsletter.
A newsletter is a great MVP for almost any idea you have. Subscriptions let us know people were interested before we had a full speaker lineup and schedule. Again, this goes back to the journey concept. Thinking of launching a business that solves for a specific need? Try seeing if a newsletter gets any traction. Look especially at the metrics around the link categories that could indicate they’d buy what you’re thinking of selling.

Marketing

A Guide To Measuring Content Marketing

Hoping to get granular in how you measure content marketing? This guide could be helpful.

Warning: It’s a never ending process.

Here’s a thought, though. Why not focus on the cumulative value of consistently producing content that is consumed versus trying to pinpoint the ROI on a single piece of content? We can easily extend the journey metaphor from today’s Prologue to all the content a brand produces. Just be valuable. Period.

Is More Traffic Always A Good Thing?

Here are 7 times when it might not be.

Number 3 is my favorite:

“More Traffic Is Not More Valuable Than Conversions”

In other words, aim to attract people who are better fits for your product.

Publishing

This Tampa Bay Newspaper Crowdsourced A Newsletter Name

Business by the Bay was chosen in a reader survey. I love that they brought readers along for the journey by bringing them into the name selection process.

India’s Trolley Times Newsletter Unites Farmers

Named after a late 2020 protest of new agricultural laws during which hundreds of thousands of farmers in India lined up in their tractor trolleys outside of the national capital of Delhi, this newsletter now serves as a reliable news source for the farmers.

How The Raleigh Convergence Embraces An Email-First Approach

“‘Newsletter subscribers find a lot of value in a digestible, consumable newsletter that serves as an overview but is also useful in that you can still learn more,’ she said. ‘A lot of them felt they knew me better because I land in their inbox and I had gained their trust—something that legacy news organizations always talked about having issues with.’”

Discovered via Not a Newsletter.

Gawker’s Coming Back

Bustle Media will be reviving the blog under a former staffer’s leadership. I’m assuming that based on this recent news there will be a newsletter.

Money Matters

Advertising Marketplaces Connect Creators With Sponsors

If you’re navigating the world of securing sponsorships, a marketplace could be for you. This article contextualizes the current state of the newsletter advertising marketplaces.

Related: We spoke with Ryan Sager, Jake Schonberger, and Sonal Mandalia about your options last week during Newsletter Fest.

Paid Newsletter Revenue Calculator

Considering going paid? Check out this calculator from Omnipresence.

Curated News

🎥 How To Automate Parts Of Your Link Collecting Workflow

Last week at Newsletter Fest, we ran a handful of sessions for Curated users and one of my favorites was Advanced Link Collecting: How to Curate Like a Pro. I’m admittedly a little simple in my curation workflow (it all goes into Curated and then I whittle from there). Now that I’m 28 issues in, I’m interested in upping my game.

Seth, Calvin, and Wade to the rescue. They demonstrated a few different workflows that include using Zapier to connect Curated to content curation tools like UpContent, Feedly, and Pocket, or creating newsletter folders in Bublup.

The bottomline: If you tend to process a ton of content (like me), consider creating a content sieve of sorts with these automations. You’ll then have a large pool of choices that you narrow to a smaller selection that is sent to Curated. Only those links will be waiting to be imported and contextualized in an upcoming issue.

And a little news: These Zaps have been updated to bring in images.

I’ll keep you posted as I implement one or more of the approaches in this video. In the meantime, if you use one of these workflows, let me know what you love about it.

ICYMI: We now have a Curated Public Product Roadmap! Check out our recent releases and what’s up next.

Opt In Challenge

Learn To Whisper Pitch Your Email List

Try Elizabeth Goddard’s approach to selling via email: whisper pitching.

“‘You have to entertain and engage your audience so much via email that the ask to buy is more like a whisper than a shout,’ says Goddard, who has grown her business to multiple-six figures in the past five years teaching thousands of students unconventional business tactics. ‘I call it “Whisper Pitching” and it makes your subscribers buy from you without even thinking about it. Plus it takes the pressure off of the whole selling process.’”

Discovered via the UpContent newsletter.

Like this newsletter?

Let me know. Reply, email me at Ashley[at]optinweekly.com, or find me on LinkedIn to hit me with some feedback. I’d love to know what you think.

Also, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with fellow email newsletter creators. All archived issues will be available on OptInWeekly.com, so you can send them the link to check it out.

Have a great week sending, y’all.

Thanks for reading,